This invention relates to electronic medical records. More specifically, the invention relates to Doppler images and medical diagnosis using shape-based similarity of such images.
Patient medical records are now being stored in electronic format. These records include structured data, such as vital signs, recorded diagnosis, and unstructured data, such as the doctor's notes, and diagnostic imaging data. In some areas of medicine, doctors routinely use multiple imaging modalities for decision making. These imaging modalities include, but are not limited to, X-ray imaging, ultrasound, and CT imaging. However, the diagnosis methodology of doctors currently is single sample-guided in that only the data from the given patient is used along with their a priori knowledge to make decisions. In reality, most patients have more than one disease whose combined effect on the diagnostic image appearance can be complex.
Flow Doppler imaging is a technique employed to detect cardiac abnormalities, including but not limited to, heart valve diseases. A continuous wave (CW) Doppler is a type of scan during an ultrasound recording where the shape of the Doppler signal tracings convey information about the functioning of various valves and arterial structures. Traditionally, clinicians have manually traced velocity envelopes to extract measurements such as decay time, pressure gradient, pressure half-time, and velocity time integral, all of which are then matched to normal and abnormal values based on clinical guidelines. While physicians can ‘eyeball’ certain patterns such as the characteristic M-shape pattern for mitral stenosis, detailed correlation of various patterns to diseases is still not well-documented, let alone be used in automatic identification of such patterns.